Tech triptych’s fresh threat to journalism

News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson at the INMA World Congress of News Media.

It is, officially, technically impossible these days to begin a speech, any speech, without joking that it was written by AI – what you might call chitchatGPT. Instead of that banal banter, I asked ChatGPT to write a haiku about the travails of newspapers – and it swiftly delivered a profound poem, in almost the correct syllable count:

Empty newsstands weep

Inkless pages echo loss

Silenced words unfold

We surely live in an age of feedback loops and the loops are feeding, feasting on the premium journalism of each company represented in this room. It has always been bracing, humbling, to be regarded as a tech troglodyte, on the digital defensive, believing in the social purpose of journalism but finding that its commercial value was usurped, undermined. To our collective cost, we discovered that the exquisite act of creation was inferior to the means of distribution and that provenance and profits were mutually exclusive. The quest to protect provenance has entered a fresh phase, as you’ve just been hearing, with the rapid evolution of generative AI, which certainly has the potential to be degenerative AI. The task for all here is to ensure that we are AI alchemists and that it becomes regenerative AI.

So we are now in a supposed era of “deep fakes” – such a misnomer … there is nothing deep or new about fakery. Without meaning to be too self-referential, or too self-indulgent, in 2007 I was asked to give evidence on the emerging digital culture to a House of Lords committee as editor of The Times of London, and I naively observed at the time:

“You have young people who are growing up surrounded by much more information … whose provenance is not clear … that obviously leaves one to fear that in the longer term, critical judgment will not be as it should be – rumours will be believed, fiction will be thought of as fact, and political agendas, among other agendas, will be influenced by interest groups coming from some quite strange trajectory … and facts are incidental if not accidental.”

That was 16 years ago and we have all certainly been traversing that strange trajectory. One positive difference is there has been a crucial recognition by the more thoughtful, more socially aware, more farsighted leaders in Silicon Valley that there was a transaction that needed to be transacted, not just for the sake of journalism but for the sake of a reasonably well-informed society. We can all lament or abhor misinformation and disinformation, yet when the fundamental facts are unable to be surfaced by reporters, we are surely a less enlightened society. In reaching amiable agreements, we transitioned, though not entirely, from being press panhandlers, from being media mendicants.

So having wrestled with a paucity of payments for actual information, journalism is now grappling with a sudden surfeit of artificial information. The craft of reporting aside, there is no doubt that AI iterations will have an impact, positive on many functions, from customer service to the finance department to the cost of coding. That will be a vigorous, sometimes painful, debate that every company must have.

On the marketing side, there is an inherent cost contradiction between personalisation and scale, and those costs will certainly be reduced and, ideally, engagement enhanced. The emerging lessons are surely worth sharing through INMA and with your colleagues as you experiment with and hopefully perfect those processes.

The media business needs to optimise operations given the extreme revenue pressure, particularly for regional publications, and the uncertain macroeconomic times ahead. But at least the myth that traditional mastheads are doomed and that only “digital natives” will triumph has been definitively debunked. Our erstwhile colleagues at BuzzFeed and Vice can testify eloquently to that fact.

As for the future, and it is the near future, there are three areas in which our collective IP is under threat and for which we should argue vociferously for compensation – the emerging picture is what you might call a tech triptych.

First, our content is being harvested and scraped and otherwise ingested to train AI engines. Second, individual stories will be surfaced in specific searches. And, third, our content will be synthesised and presented as distinct when it is actually an extracting of editorial essence. These are super snippets, containing all the effort and insight of great journalism but designed so the reader will never visit a journalism website, thus fatally undermining that journalism.

We are accustomed to defining coal or copper mining as an extractive industry – content mining is an extractive industry. On our side, AI without EI is empty content calories. Emotional intelligence should be our comparative advantage given that we are in the editorial empathy business. We need to know how to bring knowledge to the knowing – and that presumes self-awareness in an industry that has inflicted self-harm in its preening pretentiousness. And we need to be more collectively assertive in haggling for the values and virtues of journalism.

On reflection, I am still astounded that so many media companies, some of them now fatally holed beneath the water line, were reluctant to advocate for their journalism or for the reform of an obviously dysfunctional digital ad market. I am still struck that one of our colleagues many years ago, actually a thoughtful, intelligent person, explained: “Robert, I am hiding behind a large rock to see what happens to you.”

And speaking of advertising and algorithms, there is justifiable frustration at the antics of the UK and US government-funded GDI, the Global Disinformation Index and its ilk … these arrogant armchair amateurs have undue influence on ad spend by agencies and companies. No masthead is immune to sudden, capricious changes in algorithmic ranking that can affect your ad revenue. Separately, we are all dependent, to a lesser or greater extent, on advertising and yet some ad agencies are unnecessarily nervous about news adjacencies. Good luck news organisations.

And agency employees are routinely imposing their personal political prejudices. I asked the chief executive of one of the world largest companies why he had an ad ban against the New York Post – the Post is a rather large and influential platform with around 158 million monthly uniques … The chief exec said he was completely unaware of any such ban – so he checked, and to his genuine and annoyed surprise, a hyper-politicised agency flunkey had a Post prohibition. The medium may be the message but, unless we are more assertive and there is more transparency, certain advertising agencies will indulge their worst instincts, ad nauseam.

And so, in closing, a few thoughtful – emotionally intelligent – lines from the jazz poet Langston Hughes, who may have had we perplexed and perplexing souls in mind when he wrote the following:

I went down to the river,

I set down on the bank.

I tried to think but couldn’t,

So I jumped in and sank.

That is actually the first stanza of a work with a savvy, sanguine denouement ... the poem is called Life is Fine, and Langston Hughes is saying make the most of every opportunity, every thought, every cherished moment.

An edited extract from News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson’s opening remarks at the INMA World Congress of News Media.